NBA 75: Introducing John Hollinger’s GOAT Points, a new way to historically compare players (2024)

Welcome to theNBA 75,The Athletic’s countdown ofthe 75 best players in NBA history, in honor of the league’s diamond anniversary. This will be the final piece to complement a series featuring the greatest players and moments throughout the league’s era.

How do you rank the greatest players in NBA history?

With great difficulty is my immediate answer. Attempting to rank the best players from No. 75 to No. 1 for The Athletic was a difficult chore, especially when asked to compare different roles, positions and eras. How the heck are we supposed to split hairs between Rick Barry and Dwyane Wade, who ended up 27th and 28th, respectively, on The Athletic’s list?

Well, that’s where data can assist. If we use it well, data can help refine and improve our thought process for making the list. There is no ultimate truth here, no one, correct, final answer. But for a sport that has been uniquely awful at preserving and discussing its history, it seems that improving the quality of the answers might be a good place to start.

So how do we make a list of the best players of all time? There are some questions that I think should guide this, rather than knee-jerking toward “How famous was this guy?” In the case of the 2021 top-75 lists — both The Athletic’s and the NBA’s — they are questions that, perhaps if pondered more deeply, might produce a bit less of the reflexive learning toward secondary players on great teams that plagued both lists.

If we’re covering 75 years’ worth of players and only naming 75, that’s one player a year. I get that most good players play for 10 to 20 years, but still, their prime seasons don’t encompass that whole span (except LeBron James). Only three players in history have been All-NBA First Team more than 10 times; only 20 did it more than five times.

Do the math: Split up 75 half-decade-long primes across 75 years and you get five players a year; do the same with decade-long prime, and you get 10 players a year. Any way you slice it, the bar for this list is damn high.

Work backward, and one of the first gates for considering somebody for the top 75 list is: Was this guy ever considered one of the 10 best players in the league?

That’s just the cover charge to get in the door. To crack the list, you probably want to answer “yes” to that question. It’s amazing how many players made the top-75 list for whom those questions are, at best, iffy.

Or, look at it another way. Seventy players have made All-NBA First Team at least twice. That includes virtually all of the shoo-in types on any top-75 list, as well as some great players who didn’t quite make the list (it also includes Max Zaslofsky and Bob Feerick).

Those two questions I raised above are not the only valid ones, of course. There are a lot of related questions that should be part of the discussion, especially if we’re trying to rank players from No. 1 to No. 75.

In particular, if we’re looking to talk about the greatest of the great, I would propose the following outline of important questions. (This cribs heavily from Bill James’ 1985 book, “The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract,” a dog-eared copy of which still lines my office bookshelf.)

• Was he the best player in the league? Did anyone, at any point, suggest that he might be the best player in the league?
• Did he win the MVP award?
• Did he factor heavily in MVP races?
• Was he the best player in the league at his position?
• Was he ever voted All-NBA First Team? What about Second Team?
• How many All-NBA-caliber seasons did he have?
• Was he the best player on his team?
• If he wasn’t the best player on his team, was he at least the second-best player on a team with a clear all-timer as the best player?
• Was he ever the best player on a champion? Is it likely that this player could be the best player on a championship team?
• Did he have a major impact on the postseason, beyond just lucking into being on the same team as Magic Johnson or LeBron James? Did he have a greater impact on games played at the highest level?
• Was he good enough to be an impact player past his prime, or was his career over at 30?
• How many All-Star-caliber seasons did he have? Was he a fixture on the All-Star team? And, um, not due to fan voting?
• Do players with similar advanced stats get consideration in the top 75?
• Is there evidence that he was significantly better or worse than his stats?
• Is there evidence that he was significantly better or worse than contemporaries voted?

I should note, in particular with basketball history, that we should value the opinion of the contemporaries who were watching these players in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s when most of us couldn’t, either because we weren’t alive yet or the games were only televised locally, if at all. Additionally, the statistical record from this era just isn’t nearly as complete. Like it or not, the eye test matters quite a bit for that era.

You might look at all these questions and think, “You know what would be great? It would be cool if somebody made a formula to weigh all these accomplishments and rank players by where they stood?”

Well, funny you should ask. In the process of making my list of 75 players for The Athletic’s project, I developed a formula to help guide my process.

That formula is called GOAT Points, which stands for Greatest Of All Time (duh). I don’t have some funky alternative abbreviation, sorry, nor have I found an obscure backup center to name this after (someday I will create a formula called SMREK).

I’m trying to separate the players who succeeded at the highest levels from the ones who were very good players for a long time. Because of that, the indicators of elite, MVP candidate-level value are orders of magnitude more valuable than more mundane displays of excellence (like making the All-Star team or third-team All-NBA), which in other contexts might be very impressive.

GOAT Points is a cumulative points system that adds up all the “quality” from a player’s career. It rewards longevity, but not at the expense of excellence. Bill Walton’s 1976-77 and 1977-78 seasons are worth more than a lot of players’ careers. I can’t answer every question from the list above via this method, but by tilting the formula toward players with “yes” answers to the questions above, we can get closer to some objective understanding of where a player’s career accomplishments stand.

Here’s the system:

MVP vote shares: 50 points for each 1.0

Basketball-reference.com has a system for determining a player’s share of the MVP vote, which is a more precise metric than a binary first-second-third and even allows us to distinguish among near-unanimous awards from more contested votes.

For example, Walton had 0.117 MVP vote shares in 1977 (when he finished second) and 0.403 MVP vote shares in 1978 (when he narrowly won). He goes in the books with 0.52 career vote shares. The all-time leader here is James with 8.8, including 0.998 in the nearly unanimous 2013 vote.

There are eight players (Julius Erving, Rick Barry, Billy Cunningham, Spencer Haywood, Artis Gilmore, Connie Hawkins, George McGinnis and Mel Daniels) who factor at least somewhat into the top-75 discussion and received significant ABA MVP vote shares; I took these at one-third of their value. This feels like a fair adjustment: First, because the ABA had half as many teams as the NBA for nearly the entirety of its existence, and second, while it was close to the NBA in quality, I don’t think anyone thought it achieved full parity.

Additionally, I had to go back and give an estimated 3.5 MVP vote shares to George Mikan; the league didn’t give out the award until 1955-56. If you’re scoring at home, I also gave 1.0 to Joe Fulks and 0.5 to Paul Arizin.

Not surprisingly, the top 17 players in GOAT Points all won at least one MVP award. (The leader among non-MVPs is Jerry West, who finished second four times.)

All-NBA — First Team: 10 points each; Second Team: 3 points each; Third Team: 1 point each; First Team All-ABA: 5 points each

Roughly tripling the value between First and Second Team, and again between Second and Third, keeps the emphasis on the highest-value achievements. Note that even First Team All-NBA is just one-fifth as valuable as a full MVP vote share. Consistent with the treatment above, I also halved the reward for achieving First Team in the ABA and did not acknowledge the Second Team.

The all-time leader here is, again, James, with 13 First Team All-NBA selections.

Only two players — Reggie Miller and Bob Lanier — cracked the top 75 in GOAT Points without ever making First or Second Team All-NBA.

Finals MVP: 10 points each

Note that for players who played before the advent of the award in 1969, I had to “award” an NBA Finals MVP based on who likely would have won it that year. I handed out seven to Bill Russell, four to Mikan, one more to Wilt Chamberlain, and one each to Bob Pettit, Bob Cousy, Arizin, Bob Davies, Sam Jones and Dolph Schayes. Hopefully, you agree with my voting.

Other than Russell’s “seven,” the all-time leader here is Michael Jordan, who has six NBA Finals MVPs.

All-Star team selections: 1 point each

In the context of comparing all-time greats, making the All-Star team is just not that big a deal; it’s the floor, not the ceiling.

Every player in the GOAT Points top 75 was named to at least five All-Star teams except Mikan and Fulks, who, for some of their careers, didn’t have All-Star games to play in (I “selected” them for the years they were First Team all-league and didn’t have a game to play in, bringing Mikan’s total to six and Fulks’ to five), and Nikola Jokic, who presumably will play in his fifth in 2023.

I did not acknowledge making an ABA All-Star team; in conferences with five and six teams, respectively, the bar was just too low.

Career Win Shares above 100: 1 point

To balance some of the emphasis on peak value versus career value, and to reward more general team accomplishment and durability, I added a bonus for players who achieved at least 100 career win shares. This is a fairly simplistic measurement, yes, but it has the advantage of being available back to the beginning of the NBA.

Ninety-one players in NBA history have at least 100 win shares and get extra points this way. Most got scraps, however; only 26 players in league annals cleared 150 win shares, for instance. Setting a bar at 100 strikes a balance between rewarding quality longevity without overly rewarding “hanging around” years or overly punishing players with brief peaks.

The career leader in win shares is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with 273, earning him 173 extra GOAT Points. Note that I did not count ABA win shares here; there are some totals from the early years of that league that are just batty, and it produced results that I don’t think I could defend. However, I did count the ABA contribution to career BPM (see below), which was not nearly as distorting.

Career BPM above 2.0: 7.5 points per point

We have a contribution from the advanced stats, somewhat. Basketball-reference only has box plus/minus (BPM) dating back to 1974 and uses some tricks to fill in gaps for everything before 1985, so it’s more valuable for modern players than for old-timers. I included it here to help weigh the modern players. I think it’s hard for us to answer the question “How great is Paul George?” while he’s still playing, and this helps provide a historical guide.

The limitation here is that I had to make crude estimates for pre-1974 players, generally giving them the benefit of the doubt and rating them comparable to historical peers from later eras. Because of this, I had to make BPM’s contribution relatively minor. Doubling my estimate for Elgin Baylor, for instance, would only move him up three spots in the GOAT Points standings.

So what do GOAT Points give us? Still a lot of questions about comparing eras and roles. For example, what do we do with Mikan? GOAT Points tell us something we already know — he kicked the crap out of everyone in the early 1950s — but tells us nothing about the relative strength of the league then versus in 1972, let alone 1992 or 2022.

GOAT Points don’t know what to do with Dennis Rodman, either, or how to handle cases of extreme longevity (Karl Malone, John Stockton), or what to do about Jordan skipping two years of his prime and then retiring at 35*. It can’t tell you whether Walt Frazier was better than Isiah Thomas, or if Clyde Drexler was better than Wade, or if 1.75 awesome seasons from Walton is better than 15 years of Robert Parish being the third-best center in the Eastern Conference.

(*Those seasons with the Wizards didn’t happen)

What it can do, at least, is set the stage for the discussion. Maybe I weighted some stuff too highly and other things not high enough. Surely there are ways this can be improved in the coming years, especially if we get more historical advanced stats.

But I think it also brings some important debate questions to light, particularly regarding a few players who were excluded from the NBA’s top-75 list, and I’ll talk a little more about those in a few days.

OK, enough of my yapping. It’s time for the envelopes. Here’s what the GOAT Points formula spits out for the top-100 players in pro basketball history:

TIER I: The Inner Circle

I was hoping there’d be a nice, clean top 10, but actually, 11 seems like a better cut-off point. There is a very narrow gap between Nos. 4 and 11 in particular; meanwhile, there is a 118-point gap between Shaquille O’Neal at No. 11 and Oscar Robertson and No. 12.

The names at the top will get all the attention, especially since the main difference between James and Jordan in GOAT Points is the fact that one played so many more years than the other.

Malone’s presence here will rankle the “RINGZZZZ” crowd, and I would rank him lower, as well. Again, it’s hard for a formula like this to adjust for somebody being the fourth-best player in the league for 43 consecutive seasons or whatever it was.

TIER II: The All-Timers

It’s amazing what a nice, compact tier of greatness this is. Every one of these players got between 310 and 371 GOAT Points, after which we have another big dropoff. Every one of them except Chris Paul and West won an MVP award, and all of them had at least 1.8 MVP Award shares. (West finished second four times, and his 1970 runner-up spot to Willis Reed was one of the closest votes in history; Paul has five top-five finishes.) Argue amongst yourselves about what order to put these guys in between 12 and 24, or how you want to handle Mikan, but their résumés are abundantly superior to every remaining player on the page.

TIER III: The Outer Part of the Inner Circle

These players aren’t quite in the top 25. Well, not yet at least: Giannis Antetokounmpo and Steph Curry look poised to comfortably pass everyone else in this tier by the time their careers are done, but we can’t give credit for presumed future accomplishments. For now, the eight players between 25 and 32 represent a nice, comfortable boundary between the ZOMG accomplishments of the top 24 and the more mortal players who come up after them on the chart.

TIER IV: The No-Doubts-About-It (*Mostly)

No more sharp gradients here, just a nice gentle slope from Jason Kidd at 33 to Scottie Pippen at 46. I don’t think there are a lot of controversial names, with the glaring exception of two who somehow didn’t make the NBA’s top-75 list: Dwight Howard and Jokic. (Note on Jokic: All stats are through the 2020-21 season.)

Jokic is just a ridiculous omission that will only seem more laughable as time passes, while Howard seems more like a temporary blind spot from voters who remember the recent decline phases of careers much more clearly than the primes. In terms of awards, statistics and MVP consideration, the résumés of both are abundantly top-75 worthy. Even if we limited ourselves to the top 50, they still should make the cut.

TIER V: The Clear Hall of Famers

I’m surprised what a clean tier GOAT Points gave us this far down the list. Do as you wish with Fulks and Arizin, the two biggest stars of the late 1940s, but 14 of the other 15 players here made the NBA’s top-75 list, and I don’t think there were many objections to any of them.

The one exception is Tracy McGrady, whom current voters may remember a bit too strongly for his decline years rather than his torching everybody from 2000 to 2007. McGrady finished in the top eight of the MVP voting six times and made five first or second All-NBA teams, which gives him a strong case in the questions list above.

TIER VI: Splitting Hairs: The Last Dozen

Here’s where we get into distinctions that frankly are harder for GOAT Points to render a strong opinion on. Was Pau Gasol better than Chris Webber? Maybe, but only 5.3 points separate them.

More interestingly, nearly every name here didn’t make the NBA’s list. That includes old-timers whom this methodology may overrate (Bill Sharman), extreme longevity guys (Artis Gilmore) and extreme brevity guys (Cunningham, Hawkins), and one player who clearly should have been on the NBA’s list (Hello, Sidney Moncrief). Another interesting name here is Lanier, who gets a bit forgotten in NBA annals and, playing in an area of great centers, had zero All-NBA selections … but had two top-five MVP finishes and a career BPM of 4.5.

TIER VII: Almost Famous

The biggest surprise for most fans will be Kevin McHale being 91st. I, too, think McHale was better than this and had him much higher on my top-75 list. But, a lot of the Lakers, Celtics and Knicks from the glory years received humbling treatment via GOAT Points. For instance, Dave DeBusschere, Earl Monroe and James Worthy also came way short of making the cut, with Monroe having 18 measly GOAT Points. Run back through the list of questions at the top, and I’m not sure this should be much of a surprise.

More interestingly, Walton ends up No. 78, which I think is at least in the right zip code, if not the exact street. Handling a short career with extreme peaks relative to the Gilmores and Malones was probably the biggest challenge of this exercise. I’m not sure GOAT Points did perfectly, but this is a respectable list.

Finally, this section gives us a good window into who’s on deck. Joel Embiid and Luka Doncic are already within spitting distance of the top 75; each will probably crack the list if I run it again after the 2021-22 season. Quietly, George isn’t too far away, either.

Related reading

Hollinger and Buha: Which current and budding superstars are on their way to making the NBA 100?
NBA 75 panel: And they’re revealed … The Athletic’s panel’s ballots for best all-time players

(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; Photo: Streeter Lecka/ Getty Images)